A Morning for Ha Ha's

Form masticates function or, to put it another way, function is the consumation of form. Yet design, too, is an illusion.You have to treat the dream like it's not a dream - that's when things really get interesting. Your margin for error is fourteen thousand.

How do percolators work? The morning breeze interacts with steam in a pleasing way. There is nothing new under the sun except microchips and processors. Look for a woman bearing candles and expect a new friendship.

Or teaching riding lessons to children maybe. Why is it that people in the country are always making camps for kids from the city? Can you possibly understand the function of a snake brain? More slim volumes of American poetry please!

Function derives from content, period. Study the zodiac with one hand behind your back. Welcome to the Harlem Camp For Kids Deprived of Traffic Sounds. What I am asking you is, do snakes remember anything?

You did not choose your form so how can you know your function? It turned out that my poetry was her waste of time. Quite a morning for ha ha's, isn't it? Now we're both twenty sentences closer to death.

In A Store That Sells Umbrellas

Earlier I cooked liver and sausage, hunting through the pantry for some raisins. She once said of herself, I can't keep my damn mouth shut, can I? A gutted mouse on the trail, a stunned look in its black marbled eye. One can't complain about orchards in a store that sells umbrellas, can they.

We all want to be supported in a way that measures our contribution. What would those German medieval theologians have to say about your struggle with low self esteem? We scattered pine boughs around the hen yard, hoping to minimize the odor. A door a day keeps relationships at bay.

And boiled coffee which, in order to make it drinkable, required so much sugar as to nearly become a syrup. I wonder if that park bench I slept on is still there, the one where I wrote those lines to you that I still love. The bottom of the sea has always struck me as useless pablum. I do remember holding hands in Albany and fighting the tears I knew were visible in the dashboard's funky glare.

A Zen approach to exercise that one later decided defeated the point. At twilight, the laundry seems to glow. I asked God for an answer and got a fantasy to which the answer was merely a footnote. As you probably figured out, I'm drinking again.

The mud room was a repository for lost keys. He borrowed a tie for the tea party and later admitted that it was just to impress a girl. Illusions are no less troubling. Part of growing old means being willing to die by the railroad tracks alone.

A Meaningful Reflection

There was never a forgiveness as when the red bird landed. We write not to say but to learn what to say. Queen Ann's Lace everywhere and at last some Black-eyed Susans.

The kids read quietly, nearly invisible in the dusk. One sees a light, a flurry, and is changed forever. Or, as Bob Seger once sang, turn the page.

How can I approach enlightenment with tenacity and gravity when it's so damned funny? The man in red robes raced by on a scooter, the look on his face one of pure delight. Joy is familiar but only just so.

The cardinal obscured itself in a tuffet of spring grass. Sodden streamers, fallen balloons. Earlier I talked you through the moment of your death, feeling as if I had just swallowed a whopping bolus of salt.

I meant love. We are the landing page we are looking for. So many flowers, so little time for field guides.

I guess I do long for a meaningful reflection. The mechanism of sympathy works quite well in you, doesn't it? Authors paced the wall by the sea as the sun fell, watched by soldiers who were too young to understand anger.

Make of your heart a manger in Bethlehem. And beware of too many bean sprouts.

In Lieu of Transformation

This is not your father's legalese. We skated where the other struggled. An accepted opening strategy is castling, in which a line of three pawns can be thought of as a moat.

A linen disposition. A little spilled water. A cat in the window, dying.

Could we at least dispense with your opposition to the matriarchy? We chuckled behind root beer floats and vanilla coke. Tears welled in lieu of transformation.

God came and revealed me a tryptich. Why not put Gertrude Stein on the one dollar bill? We designed a bridge while munching soba noodles.

We've got to get around the importance of temples. Star-shaped clouds amidst cries of no. The baby goat bounced up to the bee hives, barked when stung, and bounced away crying.

Tunnels beget separation. The horse cleared its throat as if to say why doesn't anybody ask me where the cart goes? Beavers worked through the night, heedless of the highway department's recent purchase of explosives.

Your transformation is my old world map. A sodden mattress reeks of frog.

What Enables Her to Fly

Animals like trails for the same reason we do: it's easier going. Nobody talks about God anymore, at least not to my taste. Slimming the Queen down is what enables her to fly. Grace, grief, a touch of grappa.

Shambling bears drive the barn dogs insane. The grape arbor at last gives up its shadow. Doll's eyes, buntings. Your sewing needle is my fictive seed.

What stage? We fiddled while talkative Pharisees challenged the resurrection's particulars. Lost in the tall grass, thus out of mind. Any patch is evidence of soul.

Same shit, same day. She built a radio and the first song they heard was Donna Summer singing what was it called? Sniped oil cans, cigarette butts and a single undamaged owl feather. A dream, a stain, a falling in love with you.

A stag for every ewe. Not everything in life has its counterpart in chess. I build websites for businesses that are meant to fail. The road becomes a mess once traveled.

Open Freud's Maze

The lower button is undone. Thrumming of bees as we worked the hives lit ladders extending up to God. A single dandelion twice. Not books then but experience.

Perhaps the issue is one of faith vs. control. Perhaps we should visit a zoo eyes wide open. Freud's maze. Seedlings taking flight, despite the rain.

Ornamental punctuation. Love is letting go of little Christmas trees. Revelation of belly buttons in lieu of the Divine. We worked quickly, fully-clothed, not talking.

A dream in which war was inevitable and only one man could stop it. Magicians filed slowly past the coffin sobbing. Goat's milk ice cream, notes towards a Celtic diet. Brilliant pansies.

Brilliant fish circling the sky. Restless dogs nosing the underbrush, porcupines unsettled in sleep. She planted cosmos which I said was ironic and the gap in our marriage was thusly illustrated. Another beer, hey?

Under the Weight of Metaphor

Hanging laundry while discussing the merits of tricycles. In the mud below wizened crab apples, a bear track. Oh how I love sleepovers.

There is a geometry to maybe. We who study the architecture of swing sets. While it rained I pulled out last year's tomato stakes to assess their viability.

A wind bearing rain, a dog with a deer haunch dangling from its jaws. Board games scattered over the living room floor, an uncharacteristic mess. Sun so bright the road out appears white.

Coconuts, beach balls, salt smell of the sea! But what I really love is subtlety and nuance. Up all night writing notes toward a diet.

Ripe for a plunge, are we? She said later that a recollection of favorite kisses was imminent. My heart broke under the weight of metaphor.

Perhaps an essay exploring the reliability of cameras. Or a bird in the pines, invisible despite its soft insistent call. Adjectives, my undoing.

Forbidden you, forbidden us. At night a new dream, stark as an open fire.

Always an Orphan

We flipped through the grocery circular while thinking about bullets. Empty clothesline a few hours late. I am always spending money in ways that I shouldn't. For days now, no birds have come to the feeder.

You are not not the tools with which you write. Spring apples are hard as marble. He looked down at my wife's bra strap then at me. Later, salad, cheap wine and the last of the rhubarb baked in a pie.

There is always something else, the handling of which can be said to approximate God. We designed a tree house and never built it. Another family grew their own crystals. Let's drive to Vermont and talk about it, okay?

Yet I like holding hands, there's a sweetness to it, a simplicity. In my dream I was looking forward to a certain parade but positioned myself in a way that made viewing it difficult. There is always an orphan and, yes, a Meersman. We could strip the wallpaper, paint everything eggshell and then see about some hippie style stencils.

My love is a dog with lots of territory to guard. There is nothing like waking early in winter dark and reading the psalms by candle light. He left birthday cards up that were many years old. Forgiveness abounds.

For Pride and Pleasure and to Attack

The only way to handle so much fear is through repression yet the seams are obviously strained. My jaw aches and I hate dentists. Come down the ladder slowly, it's the only way.

The long drive to New Jersey punctuated only by coughs. Plastic lawn furniture, wind chimes, robin shit near the garden. You were saying?

For what lies beyond the nightmare? Baroque semicolons, mavens of language. Wild roses sag in the rain.

I woke to write and yet each sentence bulged with the one I wouldn't allow. Mismatched chairs a sign not of creativity but poverty and poverty is not a spiritual discipline anymore. You have to risk everything.

You want to wake up not write about waking up. We flipped through LPs, lost for what to talk about. Your flea market is my empty picture frame.

My board game? Consider rebuilding the stone walls all sinking and sagging around the farm. I'm thinking of shooting a moose again.

Once lovely, now just coffee. We invented our bodies for pride and pleasure and to attack other people so what did you expect?

Comfort Dueling Roosters

Sentence sense. Images talking. The fine line between a dream and waking.

What you use to write is what writes. Clothes left out on the line overnight are wet in the morning if it rained in the night. Echolocation as failed literary theory.

Yet it does rain and the sentences do provide comfort. Dueling roosters made the last hours of sleep unbearable. Percolating coffee, a drunk drummer boy.

Take notes re: fauna. What you believe is what you teach. Always is not a kind word.

What emerges from ones and twos? Crossings? There is no relationship between chess and paragraphs.

Will it. While ignoring the obvious I found myself some shoes. A hankering to fiddle, to create, to go West when others are cool with a simple East.

To keep going beyond the period. We are always rewriting always.

I Plan To Steal But Never Do

No sign yet of the Black-eyed Susans though they are everywhere in my dreams. There where a fawn slept, nestled in the grass. A riot of clover, a reminder to pay attention.

The brook foamed skidding down a slew of granite stairs. No sign of the beavers, but plenty of swallows feeding overhead. Forget-me-nots, which I couldn't if I tried.

May I show you another thing? Just five more minutes, five more minutes. Can I tell you something?

Two nightmares while walking home isn't bad for a guy who won't accept Jesus. Winter is for dressing warm, summer is for pretty. A rust-colored stone, smooth and square, a turkey feather, the quill intact.

What's your name again? We spoke briefly about your cross-dressing poodle. I can't outrun anything with wings, mosquitos included.

I called up the stairs but nobody answered. Soft breeze after twilight, smell of rain in the honeysuckle. Saw that water bucket again, the one I plan to steal but never do.

Oh how the past taunts without forgiveness. Tell me again you love me even now.

A Firm Push in the Direction of Randomness

One anticipates a firm push in the direction of randomness. Eggplant omelets with chili peppers and cheddar - that'll get him talking. I dreamed of an old friend and felt the familiar pang of betrayal.

Yet woke and found a shady place in which to write. This. Butterflies near the now-bland lilac, too far away to identify.

Eighteen wheelers downshift a mile or more away. God has no means with which to judge cowardice. Wasps hovered at the compost, drawn by fruit rinds, the ruins of our pie.

Later, Grateful Dead tunes were heard, not quite drowning out the conversation of roofers pissing on whoever had done the same job three decades earlier. Cukes and wildflowers planted far too late but still. Watch yourself, you might learn something.

Yet it was not clear that the law of large numbers applied. Chickens nattered in the shade, mud splattered on their breast feathers. It was nice last night to see stars, so accustomed we are now to rain.

It's not the lack of shoes so much as the inclination to define oneself through scarcity. Jesus what an idea. Or so one thinks, watching hummingbirds in the lilies.

There's an old chest out on the highway with a sign that says it's free. You aren't your past, however much they sting.

To Rise and Once Risen

There are subtleties in the sentence which delineates space. We are not the genius we think we are. Your Kingdom of Heaven is my quiet parking lot. For the sake of oh.

Lines today are usually just chopped up sentence parts. Keep working at it though, you'll get there. God smiles at every dash and comma. The point is to rise and once risen sing.

Which ends first - form or content? I remember the slaughtered cows, splay-legged in the sunlight. Where there's a will there's hope of play. Not loneliness then but something different.

If it matters, make it up. Death and eating are form and content exactly. Oh get on with yourself. He stared for hours at the stars muttering to himself.

For what I can't say. Punctuation always made her remember the goats who decried all fences. Laughter is medicinal. And then wrote, and having written, cast his notes into the fire.

But Miss Dickinson

Let us talk then about anger, here in the basement. Onions fried in butter, later buried in pizza. That poem, the earlier one.

Or else what? Drinking tea all morning, trying to sort through a complicated metaphysics, only to be told it's all bullshit. It's the same way with publishing.

Mice watch from the foundation birm, nervous but oddly stable. Yesterday turtles, divorced from traditional symbolism. You write well but don't know when to stop.

We are as characters in a play that was penned long ago. For Christ's sake. Sublimation begets what?

More quartz, dust, dried flower petals blowing over the driveway. Emptied, he wrote. Dreams of Saint Benedict and nudity abound.

Your duality is not mine. Moss crept up the tree trunks, a steady green tide bent on silence. It's the fear of hunger that drives us to words.

Oh but Miss Dickinson is not seeing visitors today. Shuffle on then to Buffalo.

The Bone Jockeys Are Ready

If you're going to do it then at least spring for pressure-treated four by fours. We laughed making sandwiches but not while witnessing divorce papers. Shimmering maple leaves blue in the moonlight.

If you can't see the world the way a frog does then don't knock science. She brought a fresh deck of cards to the table and we all questioned her motives. Silence breeds a hasty retreat.

Or perhaps goslings wrestling in tall grass. It rained and so we huddled by the fire, trying not to point fingers. Ice cream, moldy lettuce, backyard chicken eggs.

The bone jockeys are ready to go to the movies now. I emptied my wallet and later went swimming in the warm lake alone. All worship, all the time.

The mortgage balance nearly broke them yet they persevered, keeping the argument contained to minutiae such as how they squeezed the toothpaste. A dead snake occurred. What does the bible say about following blindly?

Rhubarb, apple blossoms, unfamiliar butterflies. The capitol city beckons but here we are. I woke up and there you were weeding the flower bed, whistling old Beatles tunes.

You just can't stop can you? You and your I love you but.

Service Was A Front

The revoked offer left an unexpected void into which forgiveness sprang like a hungry cat. Similes create new centers, not always good ones. I call on you to mitigate the damage by reading. We can always laugh, can't we?

Bluets near the puddles filled with frog eggs. Stopping by a fallen tree to investigate an army of mushrooms. Later a long email. Your Joycean candor is my midnight blush.

Lawn chairs stacked atop one another, frisbees akimbo. The famous actress expressed a prurient interest in the tailor and the whole village talked about it for generations. Turning over stones to look for gold pieces - that old dream. Santa Claus smoking cigarettes, criticizing eskimos.

The laundry storage service was a front for the mob. Catholics never keep their promises. We followed its paw prints until the sun fell, at last giving up. Similes center the image, thus bolstering the sentence.

Ah, complicity. We listened to John Lee Hooker, ate cold spaghetti and meatballs, and wondered what the morning would bring. Bones surface following rain. I regret the way it might have been.

Daisies Please

Dinner plans were canceled late by telephone which led to some distress. We rendered the story of a community, not of an individual. After, threats of legal action came and went. Divorce remains attractive.

Waking up alone comes first as a surprise. Most blessings contain a built-in lag time. I smelled the bear before I saw it. Brook sounds, God sounds.

We discussed the utility of text, the history of publishing, but not our own most recent efforts. Ice cream, my dear? Mow around the daisies, please. In fact, the note does mention you but I still think you're safe.

Charged with the pursuit of grace, I turned instead to poems. That old dream of fishing won't die. Creation myths are subject to perpetual revision. We commented later how his house needed a paint job.

Salt the bread dough before you fold in the cinnamon. One's life seen finally as an attempt to redefine abundance. Or else we are trying to recall the terms of the original invitation. Up the hill to bed, tired of all this pain.

A Kind of Dawn Solitude

Could we without form be otherwise bereft? Satisfaction is a poor teacher after all. Tiny koi circle the whiskey barrel where last year begonias blossomed.

This far and no further is a metaphor for what type of sickness. We insist on dying and so do. I am reminded of the bitterness of coffee.

I mean that form of any kind obscures content, no? Cameras make the world safe for Hieronymus Bosch. We drank and drank and the yellow moon slipped through the sky precisely as it did on those nights when we didn't drink and drink.

It never ends, the day for traveling. One comes to the conclusion one was meant for this. A kind of simplicity, a kind of dawn solitude.

The enlightenment is now. With what dream shall I appease you this evening? Trapped into asleep, like miners in a well.

I looked for but did not find the marble chess set. I cleaned the fan while we talked because you angry makes me need to move my hands. Who is blessed by such productivity?

And who reads these days anyway? Who woke me to say go walk before the birds then come back and write this poem?

A Drive, A Familiar One

The dim somehow grainy call of an owl up north feels brotherly in all this rain. Your sums are my painful division. Rippled glass, garter snakes, a rusty hoe in the forest.

The woman who praised my writing - and then spoke movingly of the necessity for unconditional love - appeared in my dream to be leading someone I needed away from me. Pencils, pine boughs, children rising out of the lake. Later a drive, a familiar one.

The sodden Amish bonnet found after a wind storm opened a slew of possibilities. Coffee itself is a miracle. Each sentence can be said to have a perigee, if you want to be that way.

He said he couldn't catch a break even though the air was full of them. A forty year old blue plastic rosary that nobody can say enough about. I wrote conversions when I meant convergences.

There's something about feral goats, isn't there? Swatting flies near the pine trees, discussing where to build the fire, while everybody else was out swimming. Protective father energy satisfies what new imperative?

Swallows are sometimes mistaken for bats. Arterial blood mixed with motor oil. Dancing awkwardly but not unhappily in this moonlight.

I lied about that for a long time. It felt like clothes coming off, like swimming naked in a quarry, or it felt like finally seeing the stars come out after how many nights of rain.

Mercy is Always

Scissoring daisies we spooked a fawn. A lie is a lie, not a concertina. Deceased spermatazoa attended by dreams of bluets. Another night of rain.

Another night inside the rain. I missed you when you moved to England some twenty-odd years ago. "It's sweeter not to read the mail." A swell focus on the welter of grace delineates this moment of writing.

Just eating beef suits you. Flip flops sailing through the air, landing on cars, lost in the raspberries. That invitation went straight into the trash. There is a hidden cost to any meteoric rise.

A thinning herd of cattle losing its trust. Lightening inside the clouds. Seeing you makes me suck in my gut and mentally rewrite my resume. Don't worry - it's all part of my syntagmatic strategy.

A narrative that matches yours but falls short of merging with it is what? Mercy is always. I said Christmas but I meant vintage umbrella. Oh you sweet forbidden you.

Screw the Monastic Impulse

There were no visible stars before we fell to sleep. The dog balked at the day-old chicken thighs covered in ketchup. Perhaps that was why I woke up tired, sore and angry at the presence of others. Yet still, part of me says screw the monastic impulse.

Complicated systems beg designer notes. Balloons floated overhead, making us think of sad children in the city. Scratches on the chessboard denote passion. You is my favorite pronoun.

A photographer whose favorite subject is herself. Why is it so hard to let the poor eat? Like everyone else, I am waiting for the miracle. These sentences bear me up like netting.

Tom Cruise does in fact do his own stunts. He got bored easily, which made studying the bible a fruitless endeavor. The new man bores me. We followed the deer in a generally southern direction, up a hill, as the light fell.

More code please. Yet more notes on the relationship between symbol and theme. The hoe, the seedling, the Chinese calendar. I'm all about you.

Beautiful Berries

Blossoming thunderheads, scattered hens. The maple tree came down with a tearing sound, a hushing sound, a thump. Conversations in the gravel driveway leading where.

You made me remember my days in the basement. A plethora of tomatoes in one's mind. We found a buff chick nestled in the lilac roots.

A drop of rain, a gutted moose. How does a day become nothing more than a slash on paper? Louis L'Amour reconsidered as a useful counterpoint to Thoreau.

Timber drying by the river, bees skimming the Purple Loosestrife. Dreams of rescuing kittens somehow related to a metaphysical abdication. Hey - boiled coffee ain't so bad!

We looked for deer while driving home at dusk and saw none. Cabbage seeds, strangers, the bass lines of Johnny Cash songs. A face in the cellar window that resembled my own.

You know and I know that you wanted what you found in that sleeping bag. A lie is not the flip side of the truth but another narrative altogether. The sad thing is that we are all waiting for the same miracle.

Self-righteous bullshit mocks real effort. Beautiful berries indeed.

The Trees Watching You

Sleeping in is the incarnation of what spiritual principle? The rooster's cry appeared to come from the west which was what finally woke me up. I am the law of attraction who meant to say manifestation. Destiny of any kind sucks.

Yet I began to see a certain wisdom in Corinthians, at least the early chapters. At this time of year, nobody likes a crow. I dreamed I ate wild blueberries alongside bears. Old friends walked up and down crowded stairwells, screwing their courage to goodbye.

A light rain began to fall. A chickadee stopped near the fire pit, a strand of horse hair dangling from its beak. Yesterday's prayer was interrupted by squirrels. First coffee, then we'll talk.

Friends divorcing and selling the sheep farm. We put on our gloves and worked quietly on the roof, stopping every hour or so for a drink of warm water. My daughter left a book out over night and a thunderstorm drenched it. I see a cross-shaped downtown in what I believe is Denver - or some city of high elevation - and am convinced I will meet Jesus there. Love is the answer.

I give thanks for all your commas. Harley Davidson mirror shades, a black leather vest with nothing on underneath, arguing with your hands - I almost steered into the trees watching you. Sometimes you don't want the sentences to end. A little light, some dice and a tickly feeling back of the throat.

The Ones That Mentioned God

A dream in which many links were not made that should have been. Also, the sentences were incomplete, especially the ones that mentioned God. I woke up knowing that you see the world differently than I do and for a moment I saw it that way too. It was like a mountain rising through clouds in an old painting by someone with a disciplined Zen practice. No flowers, not at all.

And no you either though you were there. Waking early at 5 a.m., tasting last night's wine and boiling coffee while the dog pisses on leggy dandelions. Milk, sugar, the broken ceramic mug I bought three years ago when Jeremiah was still a baby. The word "kick" has always made me think of frogs, one of which dove off a small birm last night into a pool of standing water. The word standing makes me think of lawyers sharing a cigarette behind a Vermont county courthouse.

Needing to be somewhere is a sickness. I'm tired of the Jesus that resembles me and tired too of pretending that I've made meaningful contact with him. Since I met you the word alien has a whole new meaning. He pointed out the walls he built, the ones of stone, and how each one was an improvement on the last. I guess we get better but to what end?

What about your dreams, including the ones with Granny Smith apples bunched together in a refrigerator? Coffee and poetry - one always ends before the other. I asked for help - I meant it sincerely - and all I got was a dream in which my life resembled a poorly managed website. Yet I know that if you see your life as a problem to which only one solution will do then you have effectively blocked God. Maybe you are the environment in which this writing becomes possible.

Listen I heard God

A man with a sweaty skull and no shirt came towards us causing J. to say "what's this?" While on the gravel road on which cold rain was puddled a purple butterfly we failed to name fluttered and blew around as if its interior radar was busted. "He's got these bright blue eyes like bright." Like that, okay?

I couldn't remember how far down the road Paul and I once rode, but remembered well the feeling of panic when we passed a certain house, the one with African masks on the porch. Oh and the bridge is out, you'll want to remember that. On the other hand, we did not see any bears, not even near the beaver pond where we made less sound because the bracken was wet. Your prayer is my amen and we are both blessed accordingly.

I couldn't take my eyes off you. Wine leaves my mouth dry. I almost wrote "wife." We drank beer in the greenhouse, our fingers trailing over the tomato sprouts.

Later I made waffles. The road dipped and in order to keep up I stopped paying attention to the rocks, even the clear quartz. Let's be clear, though - exactly what do you think it is that I can't do? Summer theater, now that'll heal the marital rifts.

My veins pop out when I'm tired. It comes down to money and it will until I have some. Bluets even there, like old friends forgotten and gone. Listen: I heard God saying pay attention and so I did, I do.

Lilacs, Early Rain

A ribbon of light thrashing on the macadam. Later, dried blood. Kundalini awakening my ass.

This was all written a long time ago. Your part is whatever you say it is. All Babylon, all the time.

The last of the lilacs, early rain. You have to look where you're going or you'll get what you ask for. Paint a picture with scripture, wash it down with liquor.

His last smile was a pure rictus. A striking clown could not have done it better. Garter most likely.

We went to the sword fight with bells on our shoes. She poured me a coffee, a series of graceful movements that suggested a devout yoga practice. Smell of honeysuckle, a dry rasping sound in the mica.

Another belated message that will not be sent. Indulge me in some cryptology, won't you? He wrote he wrote.

After the movies, lyric poetry. After that, this.

Poor Sappho

Coffee smells, revised poetry, grass obscuring the light. We come to the basement in order to make contact with language. Sleep poorly or not at all (for how long).

Well, there are other ways to get the message. He sat folded in the shape of an apple, tending to that dulcet inner voice which was never entirely absent. Consistency is one ticket but perhaps there's another.

Or a cider press maybe? The books were overwhelming and thus numerous yet she remained in attendance. Later, a novice.

The going got tough (hence art). The water pipes were all rusty (hence craft). Bluets always seem to be falling in love or is it just me.

First draft is just a draft but so is the last one. Magic works sometimes too. All the gifts my grandfather gave me are lined up on a shelf but won't be always.

We are ended. Like God I begged for a new beginning and was given it over and over. Coffee does smell pleasant alongside sweet sausages fried in butter, bits of egg sticking to their skins.

Your shell is my new lyric, lover. Poor Sappho indeed.